The invention relates generally to digital video recorders, and more particularly to management of a video archive for a digital personal video recorder (PVR).
The emergence of digital video recorders has allowed the home entertainment user to record video and audio programming with exceptionally high resolution. Depending on the capacity of the storage media used, several full-length feature movies and other programming can be stored on a single hard drive. Using data compression, a user can store large amounts of video and audio data on a typical hard drive.
Unfortunately, even extremely high capacity hard drives may not be adequate to store all the video and audio data that a user may want to keep. Many users enjoy watching films and sporting events, for example, many times before deleting or erasing such programming from storage media. Also, as the already enormous variety of programming available to a typical home theater user continues to grow still further, many home theater users program their home entertainment centers to record large amounts of programming and later scan through what has been recorded to decide what is worth watching. Accordingly, even high capacity disk drives may not be adequate for many users, if all information once stored remains on the hard drive.
Typically, when a video hard drive fills with video programming and can no longer record additional programming, subsequent attempts to record video programming cause the hard drive to delete the oldest data. The hard drive overwrites old data with the new video programming. Some hard drives allow a user to identify particular television programs or other programming stored on the hard drive as undeletable. The hard drive does not delete such video programming. Nevertheless, the hard drive erases and overwrites the oldest video data on the hard drive that is not identified as undeletable, upon attempting to write new video programming to the hard drive. This is a particular problem for busy people who may not have an opportunity to review all of the video programming stored on a hard drive as the hard drive begins to fill. Many users simply select and watch programs stored on the hard drive according to the user""s mood at a particular time, without reviewing and manually marking programs as undeletable. In other words, the user""s intervention is only to watch shows, and the user may not always attend to the manual selection and identification of programs as undeletable.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus that prioritizes programming stored on a video hard drive such that, when the hard drive has insufficient space to store additional programming, programs that have already been watched are deleted before programs that have not yet been watched. Instead of deleting less recently recorded video programming before proceeding to more recently recorded video programming, a method and apparatus in accordance with the present invention deletes programs that have already been watched before proceeding to programs that have not yet been watched.